Friday, September 29, 2006

Matter and Spirit

Yesterday I met with fellow Humanists at our monthly Humanist Contemplatives Club. After a silent period of reflection, reading, and/or meditation, we had what I thought were one of our best conversations yet.

One point that I particularly liked was made by former Catholic Priest, Ron. We were all talking at one point about how some people like to split everything into two realms of experience. Tom said that we don't have different realms of experience, we just have our experience. I noted that, implicit in the materialist position is almost the necessity of a special kind of spirituality in which we think of Nature with a capital 'N'. By that I meant that, we know for a fact, through our first-person experience of consciousness, that something bizarre and amazing is going on - just by the fact that we have a sense of experience. If matter and energy is all we have reason to suspect exists, then that says something remarkable about matter. It says that, in certain circumstances or conditions, mere matter can become experience or experience consciousness. If that's true, then we have no way of knowing if some sort of rudimentary qualia or consciousness exists in other complex interactions of matter.

Then Ron said that, for we Humanists, perhaps the problem is that we haven't developed the vocabulary to discuss some of these things we're trying to discuss yet, and so we use outdated terms like 'spirituality' [or 'soul'?] as stand-ins. I thought that was a good point and added that, perhaps it is people such as the Humanist Contemplatives who might be among the ones to think about new vocabularies for discussing such things?

We also discussed many other interesting topics and how they related to our lives, but that's for another time.

In other news, I have recently learned that the American Humanist Association has approved my becoming a Humanist Minister. However, the full process won't go into effect until sometime around February of next year. I heard this through the grapevine, but I hear they're supposed to officially let me know soon. I'm very grateful to those who helped me along and gave their recommendations, and to Minister Ross Henry, who has offered to tutor me a bit on the various ceremonies Humanist Minister preside over (weddings, funerals, namings, celebrations, and so on).

4 comments:

"One point that I particularly liked was made by former Catholic Priest, Ron. We were all talking at one point about how some people like to split everything into two realms of experience. Tom said that we don't have different realms of experience, we just have our experience."

This is excellent. I also think it is the necessary antidote to a philosophical "materialism" which, IMHO, is at least as errant as any dualistic pattern of thought. I say this, because I think many "materialists" mistakenly labour under the same dualism of their medieval Christian forefathers - only that for them, whatever does not fall under the realm of crass empiricism, gets discounted. So if anything, their openess and perspective becomes artificially narrow.

The better view, is oddly (or not so oddly) that which you'll find in the classical world - both the Stoics and Vedism come to mind here as being examples of this. While the Stoics have been described as "materialists", I think this can be misleading. What they really taught was the "oness" of all things. Thus, if the world of crudely sensible phenomena is "material", well so too would be the more subtle layers of the cosmos. OTOH, one could also cut in the opposite direction and say, perhaps, that if the more sublime things were "spiritual", so too was that which was more obvious.

The more we come to understand the world of physical phenomena, the less the affirmation that all is "corporeal" or "material" seems like the end of mysticism and "spirituality." For as you and the readers of this blog are well aware, observable matter is not so, well..."material" if by this we mean having some kind of atomistic solidity. I guess that is the problem - for too long, otherwise rational/healthily-skeptical people, have been practical atomists in their outlook. This is not only an unwarranted assumption - no, it's downright "unscientific"... it goes against what rigorous observation has been telling us for the last century.

"It says that, in certain circumstances or conditions, mere matter can become experience or experience consciousness. If that's true, then we have no way of knowing if some sort of rudimentary qualia or consciousness exists in other complex interactions of matter."

The Platonists (I'm a little cynical about the harsh distinction made between early Platonists and later so called "Neo-Platonism") held to a cosmology which admitted endless possibilities, including the existance of innumerable "Gods" and "spirits". The same was/is certainly true of Vedic thought as well (Hinduism often called the religion of "330,000,000 gods".)

While I'm sure some would say that my mentioning this in connection to the manifest mystery inherent to the cosmos is a call to credulity, I do not think it is. All mystical insight/experience is highly subjective, and will always be conditioned by our own biological and cultural limitations/conditioning. But then again, the same thing can (and needs to) be said of our experience of more "vulgar" aspects of life in this universe.

It strikes me as more than a little arrogant to be broadly dismissive of the experiences of others just because they don't happen to be our own at this point in time. Now, does that mean we must also have these experiences ourselves? Of course not - because what the classical world view also espouses is genuine pluralism. Thus, putting the matter in Vedic terms - if Bhakti Yoga (devotionalism; love of the "great other") is one man's path to serenity and enlightenment, this does not mean the other man cannot be an adept in Advaita Vendanta (absolute non-dualism/monism), which in many respects seems quite atheistic.

I think you're right on the money when you say, "I think many "materialists" mistakenly labour under the same dualism of their medieval Christian forefathers". In a way these folks, just as much as the dualistic Christians, are victims of a brutal intellectual schism that happened in Western thought, probably around the 2nd or 3rd Century. Humanity has yet to recover from this horrible tragedy of thought.

The schism I refer to is the invention of the 'supernatural' concept as we know it today. Before this, whether ancients were talking about gods, spirits, or physics, they spoke of the universe around them - "heaven" was what you saw when you looked up at nighttime. These notions were merely the first set of 'scientific' theories about why things live and how things work.

In "Christianity Without God" Lloyd Geering suggests this happened as a result of trying to rationalize the apparent tardiness of Jesus' return "in [that] generation" and the coming of the new Kingdom. How such a ludicrous concept was sold to people of the time (especially before notions of 'other dimensions & universes') I can't imagine, save to say that the desire to believe something can be quite strong.

Whatever the reason, our image of the universe was torn in two, and everything of worth, value, spirituality, hope, and happiness was tossed into an unknowable realm. This odd notion has dominated Western thought (and probably infected Eastern thought by now), resulting in what I'd go so far as to suggest might be called *madness* on a grand scale.

When rationalism, skepticism, and materialism began to resurface, instead of taking those things and reuniting them back into our world where they had been before 'the big intellectual tragedy', many simply chopped off that 'other realm' leaving all that had been thrown into it to oblivion.

Hopefully humanity can begin to heal from this gash, regain its sanity, and see the universe as whole again someday.

Please note that this is a current and active blog, but its archive is a complete collection of all my previous blog websites, going back to 2004. Entries prior to December of 2010 may mention their original website locations or have links that were designed for them. For more information, please see, History of this Blog.